INDIANS: Now, Navajo Power

The Navajo Reservation stretches across 16 million acres of sagebrush desert and red sandstone mesas in three Southwestern states—Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. The land was ceded to the Navajos in 1868, after the Indians had been battered into submission by Colonel Kit Carson. Today the reservation is in effect a separate nation-state, subject to neither state laws nor taxes. It is frontier country, where trading posts and prejudice flourish: the reservation's 140,000 inhabitants are still eyed by many whites as savages. But the Navajos are slowly gaining a degree of prosperity and political power, and with it a renewed...

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